All-Keyer

All-Keyer

1997

The All-Keyer is designed for a single purpose: to create a keyframe at every frame of a Lightwave scene file, without losing the splined motion.

Why would you want this? Many real-time 3D video games require all-keyed data. While you can keyframe a scene from within Lightwave, it is a tedious process. It also destroys the motion, as each new keyframe created changes the curve.

The All-Keyer uses publicly-available Hermite spline code supplied from Allen Hastings and Stuart Ferguson, the programers at NewTek that created Lightwave 3D. This routine allows the All-Keyer compute splines exactly the same as Lightwave does, and thus create new motions with a keyframe at every frame that are indistinguishable from the original scenes.

It is impossible for the All-Keyer to overwrite your original scene file; instead, it creates a new one. A log file can be generated with user-adjustable detail levels. Most importantly, the scenes can be batch-processed, so the operation can be run overnight on a hundred scenes if the need arises.

When creating animations, it is useful to have test objects, like swords, guns and ground planes, in the scene that shouldn't be included in the final scene for the game. Thus, the All-Keyer allows for Compare Files, which can use either a text file or another Lightwave Scene to determine which objects should be kept and which should be discarded.

A full MUI-based interface is available, making the program very easy to use. For batch files and scripts, or for people who don't like MUI, there is a command-line mode that does not require MUI in any way.

Note that this program only handles Lightwave's TCB Hermites splines. It cannot all-key inverse kinematics, motion plug-ins or any other kind of motion data. It is compatable with all versions of lightwave through 5.6. Only object motions are all-keyed.